Tuesday treats

Maybe this belongs in the "rigged game show" category. But Drew Carey will get inducted into the pro wrestling hall of something like fame.

Apparently Drew showed up at some wrestlemania event once. Funny note: when Congress outlawed the rigging of game shows after the fifties scandals, they used language about a "contest of intellectual knowledge or intellectual skill." This may have been designed to exempt pro wrestling from the rigging law. Everybody knew pro wrestling was rigged, but nobody could call it intellectual.

A couple of genuine-article athletes will turn up on tomorrow's episode of Minute To Win It. Derek Fisher and Shannon Brown of the LA Lakers will try their hand (and other body parts) at the stunts. The real trick would be getting better numbers for the show, which has hit the Nielsen skids lately.

Britain's occasionally reliable Guardian newspaper rambled through a long, sometimes baffling account of the financial tribulations facing Endemol, producer of Wipeout and Deal or No Deal among other shows. I won't try to disentangle all the gory accounting details, but the story offered one interesting nugget. Seems that Wipeout "is about to be syndicated across local cable channels in the US, while retaining its slot at ABC."

The language sounds odd. Syndicated across local cable channels? Does this mean the show could arrive on GSN or some other cabler? Or will it be syndicated to local broadcast stations? Both? Neither? Stay tuned.